The world of SEO is changing, within the last few years Google has thrown out the SEO rulebook and changed its algorithm more than a few times. “SEO is dead”, is a phrase that has been bandied about more than once, but SEO isn’t dying, it’s just changing because the world is changing. These changes are for the better and make SEO content online tailored for readers rather than robots, even though technically they are for robots. So here are five SEO no no’s that will result in either devalued links or penalisation.
1) Keyword Stuffing
Everyone has come across an article online that for some reason mentions “wooden floor panels” 75 times in an article for no reason. Mentioning something lots of times in an article can sometimes be accidental or the article warrants that many mentions, however it is very rare. This isn’t good content, creating content to mention something a lot is why SEO gets a bad name. It looks spammy and nobody wants to read the article. Create content for your target audience that just so happens to mention “wooden floor panels” and is an interesting read.
2) Keyword Rich Anchor Text
When you hyperlink in an article it makes sense to link the most pertinent part, however Google doesn’t like when you hyperlink a keyword. The algorithm sees this as spam, the way to hyperlink naturally within the text is to link the brand name. It looks more professional and when someone clicks that link they know exactly who and what website they are going to.
3) Thin Content
Google classes thin content as under 300 words, the argument here is that such a short piece of content isn’t helpful to users. The recent Panda update hit a lot of websites who posted short content pieces regularly, 300 words isn’t enough to say anything that will actually help someone. Make your content as long or short as it needs to be but if an article is running short then do more research and spread it out more.
4) Low Quality Link Building
Getting links from low quality or non-authoritative sites is another SEO tactic that Google has said is not okay. A site may look fine on the surface but get good relevant back links and check the sites visibility with Search Metrics. Always make sure sites are legitimate before you get links from them.
5) Flash sites
Search engines dislike Flash sites because Flash movies are too complex for Google to understand. There are two ways to getting around this, the first one is that you make sure that you a HTML version of the site that Google can crawl, or you can avoid Flash altogether, sites like Webeden let you create a HTML website that is better for SEO.
SEO may be changing but in the end, it’s changing for the better. The internet is made for people, not robots, so writing great content on a great site is the goal!
